March 27, 2006

Schizophrenia linked to Auto-immune Diseases

The March issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry included a paper in which Dr. William W. Eaton, (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore), and colleagues examined the association between schizophrenia and a range of autoimmune diseases by evaluating three databases.

Included in the analysis were 7704 people diagnosed with schizophrenia between 1981 and 1998 and their parents, as well as a ramdom sample of people chosen as controls and their parents.

It was reported that people with a history of one or more autoimmune diseases had a 45 percent higher risk of schizophrenia, according to the authors. Schizophrenia patients had a higher prevalence of nine autoimmune disorders compared with comparison subjects.

Compared with the parents of controls, the parents of schizophrenic patients had a higher prevalence of 12 autoimmune diseases, including -- thyrotoxicosis, celiac disease, acquired hemolytic anemia, interstitial cystitis, and Sjogren's syndrome.

"In future clinical studies, it may be interesting to search for a family history of autoimmune diseases ... in patients with schizophrenia," Eaton's team suggests. "Eventually, individual or family disease comorbidity may help to elucidate shared etiologic pathways."

Comments

funny, in 36 years of being around this disease, i've never met a schizophrenic who had any of those diseases. there must be more to this than 'doing the math', LOL, and a '45 per cent risk' may not actually translate into daily life as 45 percent more occurances.

at various points in that 36 years, i have been told by researchers that schizophrenia increases the risk of a great many things, none of which turned out to hold h20.